4.They are so limited that they don’t even do research before starting their work:

5.They work in dreary offices:

6.They turn ideas into products that nobody uses or wants:

With a worldwide network of 500 million machines, Bitdefender has the largest security delivery infrastructure on the globe. Performing 11 billion security queries per day, Bitdefender detects, anticipates and takes action to neutralize even the newest dangers anywhere in the world in as little as 3 seconds.

Appticles is a multi-channel mobile publishing platform. Their flagship product is WordPress Mobile Pack that has currently over 1,000,000 downloads. Other micro-products include mobile app themes for Progressive Web Apps and Accelerated Mobile Pages. Appticles has been through two business accelerators: Startupbootcamp (Copenhagen/Denmark, 2010) & Prosper Women Entrepreneurs (US, 2016)

UiPath design and deliver the most advanced automation platform. Businesses of all sizes, BPO providers and shared service organizations around the world use their software to provide exceptional benefits in operational quality, speed and cost.

Clever Taxi is the first free taxi app launched in Romania with more than 300,000 active users and it has the largest number of taxi drivers available.

7. They don’t know how to create and work in a startup:

T-Me Studios is a team of developers, graphic artists and marketers working in the mobile ecosystem, with four years’ worth of shared experience publishing apps on the Google Play Store and the App Store.
Two hundred million people around the world have used the personalization and productivity apps in T-Me Studios’ portfolio to change the way their phones look and to streamline and enhance the user experience on mobile.

Froala is changing the way web apps are built and edited, by offering tools that empower developers and designers to create amazing websites.
They started with our already famous editor and took the WYSIWYG HTML editing to a whole new level, and continued with website design. Design Blocks adds the amazing editing experience we created to website design so that you can create, edit and download beautiful design in a matter of minutes.

Creative Tim offers Bootstrap based design elements that speed up your development work. They build complex kits that help you create powerful projects. Creative Tim loves the web and cares deeply for how users interact with a digital product.

The idea behind Creative Tim was creating a standard of things we actually need and would personally use inside our web projects. They power businesses and individuals to create better-looking web projects around the world.

Increase Media – A creative digital media agency working for amazing business and brands worldwide
Increase Media is the perfect sweet spot between utterly creative and strongly analytical. They offer well executed digital strategy that creates both sales and happiness.

8.They are expensive as f***:

Romania is the cheapest technology hub.
Coders get less than $20 / hour

9.The world’s greatest companies just hate them:

10.They don’t know how to make a Indiegogo campaign:

This article is obviously written in an ironic manner, we are really proud of our Romanian colleagues! And we strongly recommend working with our fellow Romanian designers and developers if you have the opportunity.

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136 thoughts on “Why you should “never” work with Romanian Web Developers and Designers”

And I am proud of Romanian people :-). I strongly believe that we have so many smart people and beautiful places. We just don’t take advantage by promoting us.
I would just ask you to correct the “global possition” spelling. because I would share your post 🙂 happily once it’s corrected.

I know many amazing talented Romanians!
I actually am trying to find some dress makers in Romania to help me with my designs being brought to life.
I live in Romania now, and if you know of any please let me know!

I just read your post here and even though is too late probably to respond to your inquiring about Romanian tailors, i know one. She’s from Targu Mures, her name is Ciocoiu Petronela Elena. She has a facebook page with pics of her own work. You could send her a message there. I don’t have her phone number, unfortunately.

While I appreciate the irony in the article and find its message compelling, there are several grammar issues which take away from its full potential. Perhaps having a native speaker/editor on board would not be a bad idea?
Otherwise, thanks for the recommendation!

“forest villages”- now that’s a weird one, I get what you’re trying to say but Westerners would appreciate working remotely from a village in the middle of a forest, so try to use a different reference (e.g. working in a dump,or dreary office, etc)

Loved the article i am happy to see this kind of blog posts with outstanding content and good use of visuals. And a little hidden advertising there was a good touch creative tim team ! Overall thank you for your content and this is the proper way to advertise, orignal content and good read.

Guys, while I appreciate the article with its research, creativity, emotion, the title is very negative and I have already got 3 friends forwarding this to me asking “why not work with Romanians?”. They have obviously only read the title and so did many others. I would suggest to add something to the title to suggest it is a parody or something.

Hello, we are glad that you like the article, that means a lot for us. We made an adjustment for the title “Why you should “never” work with Romanian Web Developers and Designers”. We hope this will not create any other confusion.

That’s great, however, changing the title is far from sufficient to overcome the repugnant topic and grammatically insanity, when the writer groups and castigates individual’s based solely on geographical local. Ironically, the….. Waste of time, try replacing Romanian with any other name….. Undoubtably, my message….. Whatever. Tim’s far from creative.

Congratulations on the idea of this article. It is smartly put together and very well illustrated. If you need proofreading in the future, please don’t hesitate to contact me. I would gladly help with short pieces like this.

Don’t let the grammar nasties get to you! That is a good presentation, full of surprises – thanks for an enjoyable read. Grammar mistakes? Spelling? Layout? OK, they do identify you as non native speakers. So what – go visit some of the non-english multinationals’ websites and check their English. Hey, even English language sites have some bloopers in them.

Very nice article on a well-know topic. One question I often ask Romanian friends: what is holding back Romania from becoming an innovation hub at international standards? The human capital is great, the network infrastructure is excellent (at least in major cities), major multinational corporations have been there already long enough for transferring knowledge in the local working environment.
Romania has the potential to go further than being a great and cheap outsourcing destination, and turn itself in an hub able to export innovation and technology. Some examples are there as the ones you mention in the article but would you agree that more can be done? the question is how. and how to avoid remaining stuck in the outsourcing trap.

How much developers and designers are paid is scandalous. There is nothing to be proud of, being among the lowest paid for this kind of creative work. Instead of relying on outsourcing perhaps it’s better to just relocate to a country where you actually get paid something closer to your worth. As it stands right now, it really is shameful.

I can guarantee you that the Romanians who work at Google are paid a tad more than 19k USD / year …
Know your value and don’t compromise on it. Also another important thing to mention is that no one forces you to do overtime for that salary mentioned above. In UK, 52k USD (or £33k ) is the salary for a mid level developer who works 37.5 hours / week.

I’ve got a Romanian designer friend who came to UK last year and he was telling me about the huge difference. Here, the personal / work life balance actually exists. Developers go home at 5 or 5:30 in the afternoon and have weekends off.

So yeah, there is a lot Romania needs to do and unfortunately the developers don’t even realise what it means to work and live somewhere else, unless they experience it first hand.

Correction: Romanian developers undersell themselves.
And it is understandable…
As relative new comers to the free market economy, the Romania-based developers lack the self-esteem and sense of self-worth – the West has established for so long – needed in order to confidently demand a high price. It’s really about a mind-set we’re not accustomed to. A perfect example being the title of this article which uses some good ol’ fashioned Romanian irony, likely taken literally by your average English-speaking reader.
Even as the West has suffered relative losses in the manufacturing sector, the IT industry (despite the outsourcing) still basks in – and demands a fitting price to – its well established place as gatekeeper of the Internet: the current favourite realm of business and commerce. As the global economy eventually becomes, well, global, it won’t matter where you are.

Great article Diana! Loved the research and infographics, and the title is a definite eye-catcher! Out of curiosity, where did you find the chart that sets Romania as 9/249 The Global Position for Outsourcing? Thank you.

Man, what a load of click-bait, attention-seeking, self-ironic bull. Why do you have to be so self-centered? Devs and Dis don’t have to be labeled by nationalities. You’re on the Internet and there are no borders here.

I visited Romania there are very long (over twenty years), for a short stay of one week, and I found the people so friendly that I was promised to come back later. Unfortunately I could never come back.

But I am very pleased with the success of Romanian designers and devs.
Congratulations (many and many).
Felicitări

Congratulations for all you entire work and you are promoting the good workers!
The Romanian work is cheap because the government doesn’t rise the salaries so you can ask what you can’t !
And honestly the Romanians speaks better English than the Americans or English people.

For the past week, I’ve actually been in Brasov (part vacation, part recruiting trip)…what’s the best way to find individual developers? I’ve posted to Facebook groups and job boards, but mostly agencies respond (they mostly outsource to India).

Is there a recommended job board/website? I’m looking for both an experience WordPress plugin developer and overall web designer…

Oops i got angry at first…then realized its just a marketing trick,but i’m sorry not a good strategy..b cos it generates a lot of negativity at first and you fail to turn it completely positive,any way good try.

Good article. Romanian IT (developers, designers, testers etc) is full of skilled people when it comes to technical stuff and our culture, quite similar to the western culture, surely helps us be good outsourcing partners. We only need to get the customer service bit right and then we’ll stop being just an ‘outsourcing’ partner, but we’ll get more business development coming and even starting from Romania.

$15/hour? I was paying about three times that and still didn’t manage to get anyone good working on my project. Just to put that in perspective, a very good designer makes maybe $80-90 in Australia (before tax, so about 55-60 after tax). I was hoping to get a good designer here in Romania for roughly $30-40 (after tax – so 30% cheaper than in Australia), but haven’t found anymore to work for that.

Even though I think high of the quality of professionals around here, I believe that we need to learn how to sell and simply be nice, caring business partners.

I came recently back to Romania to kick off a project and was looking for a good designer for a very interesting product I’ve started this year. I ended up working with someone in Thailand :). Unfortunately, nobody I’ve spoken with gave me the confidence that they’d treat my project with the attention that I needed for professional work to come out of the collaboration. I ended up chatting with a few designers and after 1-2 emails, they’ve just stopped emailing. Even though they seemed quite excited about the project initially. One simple email, saying ‘sorry, I/we can’t commit to this project at the moment, but wish you good luck etc”, would have made me think of working with those designers/agencies in future for other projects when they might have had more time. Or maybe hire them full time if I needed a full time designer. But now it makes me just go straight to Thailand or other places where, be it because of the market situation or of the culture, they seem to be more professional.

For full time jobs, the situation is probably different and I’d consider getting some work over here in future and I think your article is more about full time work.

Finally, I wanted to share this, not as much to complain about my experience, but because I think this is something that we really are missing here in Romania, and I’d like to see changed to be able to comfortably recommend Romania as a business partner and so I can bring my business here … the customer focus and the long term thinking. Simple emails like “sorry, I’m not available for work now” can really make a huge difference. For an external client (like me), where budget is somewhat higher, having a reliable, trustable partner is definitely worth paying a bit extra compared to the market price as it eventually saves you time spent on always checking if that partner is respecting the deal etc. And time is generally much more of an issue than the budget.

You want my job because I’m GOOD, not because I’m CHEAP. Selling good work for cheap is stupid. This way there is always someone as good but cheaper, from Ukraine, then from Bangladesh, then Vietnam… Sell unique R&D, style, design, not cheap hours. Saying “We are the 1st in outsourcing” means “we are doing your job for less, so if you are unemployed, this is us where your job was moved”. Not something to be proud of….

Just spent last two hours searching for a Romanian factory or community to design and make blouses. Can’t find them. Would like to see Romania promote itself more. Lots of positives about the country. I visited before the iron curtain fell and saw some beautiful work. Good article. Send any Romanian dressmakers my way please!

To be honest when i first saw this link shared on facebook i was thinking yeap another guy who says bad things about romania.. i think you should change the title in why you should work with romanians … because the title sounds great in our language but in english it is an invitation to think only to bad things about our people.

Thanks for make aware from this type of thkngs and I’m the Digital Manager at Redesign Unit. We help redesign app and web development. We also help improve the concept through user behaviour insights, fantastic user experience, help with customer acquisition and support them to build a roaring growth machine!

hi!,I really like your writing so much! percentage we be in contact more about your article on AOL? I need an expert in this space to solve my problem. Maybe that’s you! Having a look forward to look you.

A lot of companies and services are trying to bring their own apps to popular smartphone platforms like iOS, Android, Blackberry, Windows, etc. Not every organization or service has skilled mobile app designers and developers. According to my point of view, it is turning tough to find out the talented pool of devoted app developers and web designers

I would love to work with Romanians in a Project.
The negative points about Romanians in the IT field are very few, because they are good at programming itself. the negative points in my opinion are as the below :
1- Poor Graphic designs
2- No commitment (not business oriented people)

I am located in Germany and I am consulting clients in reference to new websites and digital marketing/communication. I can build WordPress websites, but don’t want to make this my business. This is why I am searching for a reliable partner who can do this projects with me and develop websites according to my demands in a timely and reliable fashion.
I would like to find a reliable partner in Romania, can you recommend anyone to me?

Great article Diana! Loved the research and infographics, and the title is a definite eye-catcher! Out of curiosity, where did you find the chart that sets Romania as 9/249 The Global Position for Outsourcing? Thank you.